“Out With The Bangs. In With The Twangs” reads an ad for the latest Angel Olsen album, Big Time. Country music enthusiasts will be thrilled to hear one of Indie’s best songwriters bring her talents to the genre, while fans of her music will be pleased to know that this album is not simply an Angel Olsen album dressed in western trappings.
Whatever Elizabeth Still and David Hand did musically before they moved from the bustling city streets of Liverpool to the hills of Shropshire was probably different (they say it was much louder) than what they came up with as Haress on Ghosts. The move also prompted a kind of musical collective, with Haress contracting and expanding.
Editrix Goes to Hell is such a compelling listen. There are always multiple things going on, sometimes the complete opposite of each other. Sometimes the album is sinister and other times it's sweet. It can be rough around the edges while still feeling completely polished. It never falters a single step, never wastes a single note.
Their third album on Ordinal Records, Mowing the Leaves Instead of Piling ‘em Up sees Wednesday tackle songs from Roger Miller, Drive-By Truckers, Hotline TNT, Vic Chesnutt and Smashing Pumpkins. There is an array of different genres and the fuzzy swelling distortion we’ve grown to love is ever-present, making for a fun listen.
Enjoying Thou is very easy—it sounds right, it feels right. Thou is an irrefutable blend of metal, noise, punk, blackness, rock, doom, and experimentation. The music can be violent, it can be meditative. It’s caustic, but it is somber. Myopia, the collaboration made in secret with Mizmor for Gilead Media, is all of the above.
Cult of Dom Keller’s latest album, released last year on Fuzz Club Records, grabs your attention with punchy, gritty, experimental sounds that escape this universe entirely. They Carried The Dead In A U.F.O is a psychedelic album that emits a feeling of uncanniness by incorporating crunchy vocals and extra-terrestrial sounds.
Versions of Modern Performance, the new album by Chicago’s Horsegirl, is a noisy introduction to a band that, based on the strength of their debut, is bound to be a fixture in the future of guitar music. Any time spent with the album is likely to call to mind melodic noise pioneers like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, and that’s not entirely a coincidence.
On their Hyperdub debut, Nothing to Declare, there's enough gusto and finesse for anyone to latch onto and jump forth from. Moor Mother releases are time-travel ready. Nothing to Declare is the rare moment that really sees her grounded to the present, in step with both her own and DJ Haram's sound of this moment.
Otoboke Beaver make music that should, in theory, get stuck in your head. The incendiary Japanese punk quartet do not bide their time racing to a refrain, and when they get there they tend to sing it loud, over and over. As determined as they are to discover some infectious new chant or groove, they appear just as determined to move on to the next one.
On Diaspora Problems, Soul Glo's first LP for Epitaph Records following a string of increasingly daring EPs over the last several years, the Philadelphia hardcore punk band is taking its largest swing to date. At once manic, deeply affecting and celebratory, this is Soul Glo at the height of their powers.
The music speaks for itself, and on Site Out Of Mind, the music says a lot. The band itself calls it “garage-soul,” and that's definitely a nice way of tying it together, but the palette of sounds on their new record reaches far beyond garage and far beyond soul, where 70s style psychedelia fuses with the guitar tones of 60s garage.
On Blue Skies, with the increased recording budget offered by Fat Possum Records, the group builds upon their sonic foundation for the first time. Synthesizers, shimmering guitar overdubs, and more vocal layers than possibly live-performable combine to transform the songs into larger-than-life versions of themselves.
A Light for Attracting Attention lives an independent existence, and yet carries with it a baggage that comes from a sound that touches on OK Computer, The Bends, and even Amnesiac. The baggage is comprehensive, complex, but not weighty, because Yorke and Greenwood's cross-media paths offer an endless array of suggestions.
Cola started with friends trading song ideas and demos over the course of lockdown and what better time to announce new music then when you are retiring an old band? What resulted is the record Deep in View, and fans of Ought will be delighted to know that it has a very similar appeal, due to Darcy’s distinct vocal delivery style.
At this place in space/ time, there is an absolute aura around Tha God Fahim. With a constant, steady flow, ciphered from the ether, there seems no slowing Fahim - he has tapped into our divine consciousness, leveeing the spring to run like a river, and crafting soundscapes in the elegantly sophisticated fashion of legends.
Nate Mendolsohn has a few other releases of mostly rough and scratchy lo-fi type sketches under his belt as Market, however on this record there is an ever shifting psychedelic hue and a touch of folk influenced honesty. His songs become fully fleshed out with his band providing ample counterparts to the slightly twisted arrangements
